No Place Like Home 69
Washington Avenue and past a meatpacking
plant where bare-chested men wrestled whole
beef carcasses hung on hooks on little overhead
trolleys along a rail and into the waiting trucks.
I pedaled up Hennepin Avenue, past dirty-book
stores, penny arcades, walk-up hotels, men
slumped in doorways, to the magnificent old
public library on Tenth across from White Castle,
home of the ten-cent hamburger (“Buy ’em by
the Sack”), and climbed up to the reading room,
skipping the swimming lesson at the Y Mother
had paid for so I’d learn to swim after cousin
Roger drowned in Lake Minnetonka; but the Y
conducted swim class in the nude and I was shy,
so I went to the library instead and met the book
that changed my life—transformed, enriched,
diversified, turned it topsy-turvy too—Roget’s
International Thesaurus, supplier of idiom,
lingo, jargon, argot, blather, and phraseology
that transformed me from nerd and nobody to
visionary, sporting man, roughneck, bon vivant,
and raconteur.
Growing up among the Brethren, a boy was
ever aware of worldly temptation, and from
that comes a keener perception of the world. A
school field trip to the Milwaukee depot where
the Hiawatha stood throbbing, waiting to de-
part for Chicago, steam hissing from the loco-
motive, the luxurious club car blue with cigar
smoke from slick gents in three-piece suits—for
the Brethren boy, an electric vision of worldly
success and glamour. When I was 14, I got a tour
of the art deco headquarters of the Minneapolis
Star and Tr ib un e . Upstairs, pencil-neck geeks
tapping out copy and down below, the giant
presses roaring, miles of newsprint flying out,
chopped and folded into the evening Sta r, bun-
dles of papers conveyed onto trucks and rushed
to the readers, and the thought rang like a bell:
I could be one of those guys upstairs. There
were the neon lights of Hennepin Avenue and
the promise of naked girls at the Alvin Theater,
which our family passed on Sunday morning
on our way to church, but that was lost on me,
a geek with glasses, pressed pants, plaid shirt, a
boy for whom dating girls was like exploring the
Amazon—interesting idea, but how to get there?
Writing for print, on the other hand—why not?
And then came the beautiful connection: You
write for print, it impresses girls, they might
want to go on dates with you.
A boy named Frankie Renko drowned in
the river one spring at the sandy bank where
we boys hung out. I was eating supper when
the fire truck went by, and I wanted to go see,
but Mother said, “ There’s no point in a bunch
My crude map. The key to our geography is the
river. Anyone can get lost trying to navigate
the freeways through the suburbs, but once you
find the Mississippi, you know where you are.